I discovered an amazing thing when I started chronicling the birds at Honeymoon Lake, where I live. I found several sites that had his plates of The Birds of America but the suprise, for me, was that Audubon had written about the birds as well as painted them and his descriptions were wonderful. The site that had the text for The Birds of America had to be taken down because of too much traffic and it was supposed to be put in the site of the National Audubon Society. I stopped adding to my bird pages waiting for the text to return. It hasn't.

So I finally went Googling to see if the texted existed on the web somewhere. It does. It's on an amazing site — Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Unfortunately it's not in HTML but in scanned pdf pages. Good enough. It turns out that he also included chapters "with occasional descriptions of the scenery and manners of the land which has furnished the objects that engage your attention." Chapters about life in a country that was giving way from wilderness to civilization. I will be putting up the relevant bird chapters and his "occasional descriptions." More on this later but here is the first of these chapters.

The Ohio

WHEN my wife, my eldest son (then an infant), and myself were returning from Pennsylvania to Kentucky, we found it expedient, the waters being unusually low, to provide ourselves with a skiff, to enable us to proceed to our abode at Henderson. I purchased a large, commodious, and light boat of that denomination. We procured a mattress, and our friends furnished us with ready prepared viands. We had two stout Negro rowers, and in this trim we left the village of Shippingport, in expectation of reaching the place of our destination in a very few days.

It was in the month of October. The autumnal tints already decorated the shores of that queen of rivers, the Ohio. Every tree was hung with long and flowing festoons of different species of vines, many loaded with clustered fruits of varied brilliancy, their rich bronzed carmine mingling beautifully with the yellow foliage, which now predominated over the yet green leaves, reflecting more lively tints from the clear stream than ever landscape painter portrayed or poet imagined.

The days were yet warm. The sun had assumed the rich and glowing hue which at that season produces the singular phenomenon called there the "Indian Summer." The moon had rather passed the meridian of her grandeur. We glided down the river, meeting no other ripple of the water than that formed by the propulsion of our boat. Leisurely we moved along, gazing all day on the grandeur and beauty of the wild scenery around us.
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